The Watcher

Twisted 'Sunny' shines this season

September 18, 2008|By Maureen Ryan

There's a quick way to tell whether the audacious "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (9 p.m. Thursday, FX) is your kind of comedy.

Picture a scene of two people in a morgue, looking for human flesh they can consume (it's a long story). They reject taking flesh from the body of a dead African-American, deciding a fleshier white corpse looks more promising, then discuss whether that decision was racist. Of course, they don't get around to harvesting man-meat, but that's not an atypical conversation on "Sunny."

If you think "Sunny" can make that funny -- and in my view, it does -- this gleefully transgressive comedy should definitely be on your fall viewing schedule. "Sunny," which has markedly improved over its four seasons, is certainly much better than any of the network comedies that will debut in the next couple of months.

This energetically ribald comedy follows the adventures of four twentysomething friends who run Paddy's Pub, a rundown bar in Philadelphia. Lack of intelligence, money and forethought never prevents Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson), Mac (Rob McElhenney) and Charlie (Charlie Day) from pursuing an ever-changing variety of hare-brained schemes.

The season premiere revolves around not just one but two hunts for human flesh, and the Sept. 25 episode has the Paddy's crew taking on the energy crisis -- by buying gasoline, of course. Far from trying to rein in their worst excesses, Dee and Dennis' stepfather, Frank (Danny DeVito), only adds to the general chaos (many bad things flow from Frank's decision to tint the inside of his car's windows).

The things the characters do are often dark, and they constantly taunt each other and anyone who happens to cross their paths. But it's not really accurate to characterize "Sunny" as a mean-spirited comedy. Though it revels in its rudeness, "Sunny" is too goofy and energetically willing to please to be compared to the likes of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Not all of the show's demented comic gambits work, but "Sunny" gets points for inventiveness, and the show is far more consistently entertaining than it was in its first couple of seasons. And as it has evolved, "Sunny" has done a much better job of modulating its energy. In the past, it sometimes felt as though every character ended up shouting in almost every scene.

Now the characters are more differentiated (Dennis' offhand arrogance contrasts nicely with Charlie's manic frustration), and some of the best lines on the show are the muttered throwaways. A nearly wordless sequence, in which Mac, Dennis and Charlie attempt to seduce a bank loan officer, is one of the funniest things I've seen all year.

Dennis, Mac and Charlie have a very entertaining running debate in Episode 1 about which one of them is the "brains," which one is the "looks" and which one is the "wild card." This being "Sunny," not one of them is the genius, a comedically fruitful situation that's unlikely to change soon.